Werner Herzog Quotes (24 Quotes)


    Technology has a great advantage in that we are capable of creating dinosaurs and show them on the screen even though they are extinct 65 million years. All of a sudden, we have a fantastic tool that is as good as dreams are.

    It's not that I do not care about it. I've seen it very often in my career. For example, 'Aguirre The Wrath of God' was refused by the Cannes Film Festival and in the German press it was so badly reviewed that you had the feeling it was the worst film of the decade and it endured the test of time. I'm very very content with 'Grizzly Man,' because I think it was pretty much the best reviewed film of the year and it had lots of audiences that loved the film and what can you ask more I'm totally pleased and totally content with what I have done and with the reception of the film.

    I don't spend sleepless nights over getting very bad reviews.

    We had some ranting about the meaning of nature, ... And Jewel is more defending Treadwell's position, that there is harmony in the universe and the only disturbing element is human beings. I don't see it that way.

    I have never left my culture. It doesn't matter whether I film with Australian aborigines or in Antarctica.


    I'm making films for an audience out there and a very tiny fraction of them are would-be filmmakers. But let's speak of them-the would-be filmmakers, the tiny fraction. I've witnessed many times when I've showed films and was present at a screening that exactly those people feel very much encouraged by what I'm doing.

    I know whenever it comes to be really dysfunctional and vile and base and hostile on screen, I'm good at that!

    I just hope it's a small one. I only travel light. It's got to fit in my hand-held luggage.

    I cannot work fast enough. I cannot cope fast enough, really. And just releasing a film is hard.

    Of course this is me revisiting my own past, going into the wilderness, telling a story, perhaps not the one I set out to tell, ... I had no opinion about Treadwell . . . I gave him space, let him tell me his story. And it was pretty easy to see that he w

    Let's put it this way: art house theaters are vanishing. They have almost disappeared completely, and that means there's a shift in what audiences want to see. And they have to be aware of that and be realistic. It's as simple as that.

    People think we had a love-hate relationship. Well, I did not love him, nor did I hate him. We had mutual respect for each other, even as we both planned each other's murder.

    For such an advanced civilization as ours to be without images that are adequate to it is as serious a defect as being without memory.

    Strangely enough, I've always believed that my stories were mainstream stories the films are narrated in a way that you never have a boring moment.

    I love my movies as they are. I let them develop their own lives.

    Only 30 minutes from where I live, there is a completely hidden and forgotten archive. Nobody even knows that this exists here.

    You should look straight at a film; that's the only way to see one. Film is not the art of scholars but of illiterates.

    Very often, footage that you have shot develops its own dynamic, it's own life, that is totally unexpected, and moves away from you're original intentions. And you have to acknowledge, yes, there is a child growing and developing and moving in a direction that isn't expected-accept it as it is and let it develop its own life.

    I'm old-fashioned I'm a man of celluloid. I think it still has a depth and a precision that you do not have in the digital domain, and the digital domain has some disadvantages. When you shoot something and record it with a digital camera, you have an instant access to it - you don't have to wait for the dailies.

    I can tell those apart who can milk a cow, I mean with their bare hands. Sometimes people can tell by looking at someone, 'Aha, this must be a drug dealer or this must a lawyer.

    ecstatic truth. I've always tried to strive for a much deeper truth in the images, in cinema, in storytelling, on a screen, so whether I've achieved it or not remains to be seen. . . . There are short fleeting moments when I know that I have achieved it.

    Facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes their inherent truth seem unbelievable.

    I have my doubts about his attitude toward wild nature and that he did anything to help the bears, ... Wild nature is simply wild, and we have to respect that. He keeps repeating to the bears 'I love you,' and I think that is wrong. You should respect the distance.

    There are certainly laws and elements that make a film more accessible to mainstream audiences. If you've got Tom Cruise as a strongman, I'm sure it would have larger audiences, but it wouldn't have the same substance.


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